


Sunday Morning Coming Down

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Early Season Vibes, M/M, Season 1 Sam, Season 15 Sam, Selfcest, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:49:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27148955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: There’s a man sitting at the edge of his bed. He’s too familiar and not familiar enough. He smells like nothing, and Sam sees his own face and squeezes the trigger. It’s not silver, but Sam figures being shot in the face at point-blank range will slow anything down.Sam is just trying to survive living in a car with his brother and finding the thing that killed his girlfriend. He doesn't need these visits from his future self.It happens kind of a lot.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	Sunday Morning Coming Down

**Author's Note:**

> This is legitimately one of the weirder things I've written, and I am inordinately pleased with myself.

Sam wakes in the middle of the night, terrified. It’s a normal state of affairs. He hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Jess died. He wakes up with his heart pounding and his own breathing harsh in his ears. He wakes up panting, mouth dry and fingers clasped around the handle of a loaded gun.

There’s a man sitting at the edge of his bed. He’s too familiar and not familiar enough. He smells like nothing, and Sam sees his own face and squeezes the trigger. It’s not silver, but Sam figures being shot in the face at point-blank range will slow anything down.

The bullet lodges itself in the wall, harmless except to the plaster and the neighbors in the next room over, probably. Dean is gone—probably still with that waitress from last night—so there’s no one even to complain. The smell of gunpowder curls itself around his nose, familiar as a lullaby.

“I tried that too,” the man says with a faint, pained smile on his face.

“Who are you?” Sam demands, and the man just looks at him pointedly.

It’s not _exactly_ his face. Sam can see that now. The light that cuts in from the window is murky at best, but Sam can make out faint lines cutting across the side of the face he sees in the mirror every day. He can see silver strands shot through hair that’s much longer than he keeps his own. He wonders how he manages. Wonders that it doesn’t get in the way in a fight.

He reaches over to turn on the bedside lamp, but the presence at the edge of the bed stops him with a hand over his own. He feels solid enough—looks solid, except for the fact that Sam just watched a bullet go straight through him.

“Don’t. Please.”

Sam jerks his hand back. The man looks almost guilty.

“Fine,” he says at last, and it earns him another small smile.

“Where’s Dean?” the stranger asks.

“Out.”

“Ah.” Then he says, “Go back to bed.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. “You realize I’m not going to do that, right?”

Older Sam shrugs.

Sam hates this man, this funhouse mirror version of himself. He smiles like it hurts. Like someone personally dove into his heart and poured poison there, like they strung up his lips with fish hooks. Sam hates it.

“What did they do to you?” he asks.

The older Sam sighs. “They tried their best, okay? And so did we.”

“Did you?” Sam doesn’t know why he pushes. It’s a cruel impulse.

“I thought I did.” He sounds lost when he says it. Lost and crumpled down, built up and cut back down to size until there’s nothing left. It gives Sam the chills how much it feels like looking at nothing. He spreads his hands. They’re so wide and thin.

He shouldn’t ask it. He knows the answer, even without asking, but he has to say it anyway. The way the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, he has to know. “Do we ever get out?”

Sam spreads his hands as if to say _look at me._ He laughs, then. He really laughs. It’s an awful sound, and Sam hates that too.

“No, kid,” the older Sam says when he finally gets a hold of himself. _Kid_ sounds like _idiot_ in his mouth. “Of course we don’t.”

* * *

These sightings—these _visitings—_ keep happening. Sam keeps his mouth shut about them because he doesn’t even know how to begin to address it. Hey, Dean, by the way, a grizzled, skinny version of me keeps showing up at weird times whenever I’m alone. What do you think we should do about that?

Dean would probably want to hunt it. Bobby, too. And Sam doesn’t trust the doppelganger that keeps finding its way into his room, but, well—it’s _him._ He knows that. He can feel it way down deep in his bones. So if he has a kind of affinity for _himself,_ well. It’s only natural, isn’t it?

“Tell me something,” Sam says the next time he sees his twin. They’re in a truck stop bathroom this time, somewhere off the I-90. Sam leans back, his hip cradled against the edge of the sink, and folds his arms.

“Like what?”

“Tell me something about Dean.”

Other Sam’s lip curls up. It’ll do that, he notices. The only thing that can consistently jerk a smile out of this guy is the mention of Dean. Sam wonders if that’s true for him as well. He wonders if he’s this transparent.

“He still loves bacon cheeseburgers.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Of course. Too easy—give me something else.”

Other Sam thinks for a second. “He makes a mean cheeseburger too, but don’t ever tell him I said that.”

“Dean cooks?”

“Hand to god.” His older self is grinning now, open and easy, and Sam likes it; it’s good to see. But there’s something in there, something else, and he latches onto it.

“God—is that? Are we—?”

Other Sam’s smile clicks off like it’s set to a switch. “No. Not—it’s just a figure of speech.”

“Okay.” Sam’s left feeling wrong-footed and wondering what it was he said.

His double leaves not long after, and he mulls it for the next sixty miles, only letting it go when Dean finally asks, “Dude, what’s with you?”

“Nothing,” Sam mumbles. His eye catches on the curve of his brother’s cheek, smooth and tanned from summer. It snags on the faint freckle by Dean’s right eye. He shrugs it off again before Dean notices him looking.

“Whatever.” Dean reaches over to turn up the stereo, and Sam goes back to watching the dotted white lines pass in the window.

* * *

Sam is lying on his back in a motel room. It’s dark except for the red glow of the digital clock beside him, dim and faintly sinister. He’s lying on top the bedspread, the scratchy drag of it feeling damp beneath his palm as he idly drags it back and forth. He doesn’t know why he can’t sleep.

The yellow-eyed demon is still out there, and they're still no closer to finding Dad. They have his journal and the occasional bullshit cryptic text message and not much else. It’s enough to make him want to scream. He pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes hard enough to make himself see stars and tries it, opening his mouth, unhinging it as far as it’ll go on a silent yell.

He gasps at the unexpected feeling of a big, warm hand against his mouth, a gentle two-finger touch at his wrist. He sucks air in hard through his teeth, but he doesn’t yell, doesn’t scream. Doesn’t wake Dean in the next bed over, dozing heavily from the beer bottles now littering the tiny motel trash can. The rhythmic, sawing-wood sound of his snores sets the metronome for the bed creaking as it dips beneath a new weight.

He’s come to expect these visits. It’s the only explanation for why he doesn’t scream. For why he only sighs when Sam settles in next to him. His older double jerks his head toward the parking lot, a silent question that Sam can only just make out in the dark, and he nods. He creeps out of bed and opens the door gently, inch by torturous inch, thanking God and whatever angels are up there for well-oiled hinges.

He slips out onto the hallway quiet as a ghost, his double right behind him. He feels like he can breathe for the first time out in the open air—didn’t realize how much he was suffocating in the quiet hum of the air conditioning. He leans against the railing and feels the cool bite of the wind against his face, the cold metal against his hands. He looks down at the parking lot below, mostly empty save for a few cars studded here and there. He sees the Impala, sleek and pristine, throwing the light of the moon back in his eyes.

The other Sam stands at his side, hands clasped over the railing, saying nothing. He lets Sam have a moment before he starts walking, pausing to make sure Sam follows. They walk down the stairs and into the parking lot, putting more distance between themselves and the door where Dean sleeps. Sam tucks his hands into his pockets and kicks at the gravel as they go.

“It’s a nice night,” his older self says.

Sam tilts his head side to side. It’s so-so. It feels a little better now, like this. “Was it a good night where you came from?”

The other Sam tilts his head in an identical gesture, and Sam huffs a laugh. He can see the lines on Sam’s face better now, deep grooves on his forehead from worrying. Sam drags his hand over his own forehead self-consciously.

He wonders why the other Sam comes here sometimes. He wonders it a lot. Wonders if he does it on purpose, if he plans it, or if it’s just as much a surprise to him as it is to Sam. He never asks. He’s not sure if it’s because it feels like breaking an unspoken rule or because he just doesn’t want to know. It’s nicer if he doesn’t know what this is, somehow. It’s nicer if he can just have this and pretend.

“How are you and your brother?” the other Sam asks, as if he doesn’t know.

Maybe he doesn’t. Sam can remember a lot of things like they were just yesterday: the way Janie Ziegler’s hair smelled in 10th grade, like strawberries and chemicals. The first time he hunted a werewolf. The first time he met Jess. He can’t remember every fight he had with Dean when he was seven.

Or maybe the other Sam is just being nice. Sam had mentioned it last time, he remembers—the way he and Dean have been at odds, the tension that lives between them in every room. It makes his skin itch like it’s shrunk in the wash, grown two sizes too small.

“The same,” Sam says. “Little better.”

The older Sam nods. “That’s good.” He slants a look at Sam as they take a lap of the parking lot. They pause to look up at a glowing billboard advertising Subway sandwiches. Sam just looks at Sam. “You’ll work it out, you know. It’ll get better.”

“I guess you would know.”

The other Sam drags a hand over his jaw, a nervous, unconscious gesture that Sam doesn’t have yet. He wonders about that—wonders when he picks it up. Wonders who from, and why. More questions that he doesn’t know how to ask.

“Are you happy?”

The older version of him blows out a breath. “Hardball tonight, huh?”

Sam shrugs. “Guess I’m in a hard mood.”

“That’s fair.” He still doesn’t answer the question, but the look on his face doesn’t say that he won’t.

They take another lap of the parking lot. Sam is patient.

“That’s a complicated question,” older Sam says at last.

“It really isn’t.”

The other him shakes his head. “God, did I really used to sound like that? I take back, like, half the shit I said about Dean.”

Sam feels like he should be offended but isn’t.

“It gets complicated,” his double says. He focuses hard on something in the distance. “You don’t think it will, but it piles on, layer by layer, year by year, until you’re living a life that you wouldn’t recognize. You make choices, choices are made for you. You give things away—things you don’t think you can spare, but it turns out you can. You learn what you can live with. We adapt.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

The older Sam shrugs. “We’re hunters. Not much about the life is reassuring.”

Sam bristles at the word _we._

His double nods at the motel, a hulking splotch of grey in the dark. “But you’ll have him. I do. You’ll both—you’ll see each other through, even when you don’t want to. Even when you wish that one or the both of you could just leave well enough alone, you still will.” He looks like he’ll say something else, but he bites his tongue at the last minute. The other Sam shakes his head. “God, I’m jealous of you.”

That takes Sam aback. “What? _Why?”_

He thinks about the fleapit motels, the uncertainty, the ache in his ass from sitting in the car for day after day and mile after mile. He thinks about the scent of Jessica’s skin burning, the way it sometimes feels like it’s seared into the inside of his nose permanently. And he knows his other self knows, but at least this other Sam is decades away from any of that. If anyone should be jealous, it should be him.

But the other Sam just shakes his head. “It’s nothing. Nostalgia, don’t worry about it. I hear it happens to the elderly.”

Sam makes an offended sound. “Watch it, we’re not that old.”

They’ve stopped walking. They’re sheltered from the street by an overgrown shrub. Their eyes find each other, and the mood is different now. Less morose, but no less charged. Sam wonders, if this is his own face, why he can’t stop looking.

The older version of himself cups his jaw in sure, strong fingers, but his grip is surprisingly gentle. He pulls Sam forward with a hand cupped around the back of his neck, and Sam tilts his head. He closes his eyes and parts his lips, and he isn’t surprised when he feels the warm brush of lips against his own. His double kisses him, gentle but insistent, and Sam lets him.

He’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, things are weird with Dean, and Sam’s life as he knew it is in tatters. He tamps down a laugh that wants to bubble up in him because this just makes sense, doesn’t it? Of course Sam would end up here, making out with himself in the middle of a parking lot in Oatman. Of course.

He angles his head so he can suck on his double’s bottom lip. He lets the older version of himself lick into his mouth, lets him study the roof of his mouth and the ridges of his teeth. Their tongues stroke together, slick and hot as hell, and Sam makes an embarrassing noise.

It stupidly occurs to him that they’re the exact same height, the exact same size. It gets him hotter than anything.

The other Sam kisses him dizzy, and Sam can only cling to him. His hands are threaded into a shirt he owns fifteen years into the future, hanging on for all he’s worth. They pull apart, and the other Sam smiles at him, one of those pained, wounded animal smiles Sam is getting to know so well—and then he disappears.

And Sam is left panting in the parking lot, blinking dazed into the bright lights that might as well belong to a different world.

He kicks at the gravel and stands in the middle of a quiet Arizona town like anything different might happen. He waits, and he shivers in his clothes. Eventually, he gives up. He trudges back up the stairs to his room, too wired for sleep, feeling all lit up from the inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Always happy to say what's up on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
